New Hobbit Trailer Shows Off A Lighter Touch

Just like Peter Jackson promised earlier this week, a new trailer for The Hobbit has debuted online, giving us a much more detailed and sillier look at this December's return trip to Middle Earth. Take a look at the trailer embedded below, or in HD at Apple:

No look at the dragon Smaug just yet-- it seems perfectly reasonable to believe he won't show up until the second film--but a lot of the other big players are there, including the return of several characters we remember from the Lord of the Rings series. There's also an extended bit with the wizard Radagast the Brown, who we got our first look at a few days ago with promises he would have a much bigger role than he did in the original book. I'll have to rely on really big Hobbit fans to tell me what added material they might have spotted here. With three movies to make out of a single book, we can count on seeing a lot of things that might have only been hinted at in the books. Then again, with An Unexpected Journey setting the stage for what's to come, it might stick pretty closely to where Tolkien took us.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey comes out December 14 this year, and you can click here to learn plenty more about it. The other two films in the trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug and There and Back Again are due December 13, 2013 and July 18, 2014, respectively.

Note: the trailer debuted as an exclusive at MSN, but their embeddable trailer isn't working well, so we're using YouTube for now.